Website Visibility: The Theory and Practice and Improving Rankings

Citation

Bação, F. (2010), "Website Visibility: The Theory and Practice and Improving Rankings", Online Information Review, Vol. 34 No. 5, pp. 817-819. https://doi.org/10.1108/14684521011084663

The Internet constitutes an essential communication medium for any modern business. The cost of letting the world know about your products or ideas via the internet is very small, especially when compared with other media. Anybody with minimal technical skills can put up a web page in just a few hours. This is a remarkable fact, an amazing change in the media landscape and one that occurred very quickly. This phenomenon ensured that millions of businesses and people around the world have an opportunity to promote their products and opinions to a massive audience. This was quickly understood and now, with so many web sites competing for internet user attention, the challenge is: How can I draw visitors to my web site? How do I get the message to the intended audience? How can I make sure that anybody trying to find my product can find my web site?

Search engines have made the life of internet users much simpler. They are an indispensable tool in dealing with the enormous size and complexity of online information. They can be seen as the windows to a marvelous world of information and knowledge. Studies have shown that the vast majority of users find web sites by using the major search engines. This is why web site visibility and search engine optimisation (SEO) are so important. If we can assume that the ultimate goal of a web site is to attract internet users, then understanding the principles of web site visibility and SEO constitutes an invaluable skill to any site owner. SEO can be thought of as the art and science of producing web pages that are attractive to search engines, thus improving the probability of achieving good rankings in search engine results, and this is what Website Visibility: The Theory and Practice and Improving Rankings is all about.

The book is divided into seven chapters which guide the reader through the elements that will ensure good rankings in search engine results, and in doing this also sheds some light on the inner workings of search engines. In the accompanying web site the author provides a summary of the book which starts: “This book marries academic research results to the world of the informatics practitioner, in the quest to achieve high web site rankings in search engine results.” This is probably the most distinct feature of this book, the effort to connect academic research with the practitioner's world. Writing a book based on this idea is not easy, especially in a topic where practice changes daily and trade secrets abound. Additionally, the concerns that guide academic research are not always in line with “how‐to” prescriptions expected of a book on web site visibility. Nevertheless, in my opinion the author does a good job in bringing together these two communities, especially in providing academic references to the reader.

In the first chapter, the author introduces the web site visibility problem and its major concepts and implications, helping the reader with the most relevant definitions and terminology of the field. I consider Chapter 2 to be the weakest one. Here the author tries to produce a point‐scoring system that combines the results of academics and practitioners into a single framework, the Weideman model. The objective of this exercise is to rank different elements of web site visibility according to their importance, taking into consideration the opinions of both academics and practitioners. It is not that the idea lacks credibility, but the final result does not improve the book, especially in terms of readability. I would assume that the typical reader of this book will be looking for information on how to improve web site visibility and will not be interested in knowing the methodology used by the author to come up with a single framework that elicits the elements that promote web site visibility and the ones that have a negative effect. Probably most of this chapter could have been presented in an appendix, so the readers could have the option to explore the methodology behind the classification of the positive and negative elements of web site visibility without affecting readability and alienating the reader.

Chapter 3 is dedicated to the elements that promote web site visibility, and this is probably one of the best chapters in the book. The author goes through the most important elements that a web site should have in order to improve its visibility. The author discusses the role of elements such as in‐links, body keywords, hypertext/anchor text among others. This is the chapter where you can learn about how to increase your web site visibility. Chapter 4 deals with the elements that harm web site visibility and make life difficult for search engine crawlers. Again this is an interesting chapter where the novice can find plenty of useful information on what to avoid when seeking good rankings in search engine results. Chapter 5 treats the elements that can result in banning by search engines, like link spamdexing and keyword spamdexing.

Chapter 6 is disappointing. Here the author presents three case studies which are not very interesting and from which one learns little. The cases are presented superficially and helped me marginally in relating the concepts presented during the book with their implementation in “real world” web sites. It would have been much more interesting to use this chapter to provide a thorough review of the web site produced by the author for the book (www.book‐visibility.com). Finally, Chapter 7 presents a quick overview of the most relevant recommendations made in the book and gives some ideas on the future of the theme.

Overall this is an interesting book, providing a good introduction to the issue of how to increase web site visibility. It helps the reader understand the most successful strategies to promote SEO. The accompanying web site is very helpful in understanding the way in which these strategies can be implemented. And note that www.book‐visibility.com ranks well (15th in Google) in a search using “website visibility” as a key term, which is a good indication of the author's expertise on the subject. This is especially notable if we consider the competitive environment for such key terms and keywords. Finally, I think the book would benefit if most of Chapter 2 were included as an appendix. In order to improve the relevance of the book as a teaching tool, Chapter 6 could have been used to thoroughly present and discuss the accompanying web site, instead of presenting some irrelevant case studies. The book's organisation would also benefit from using numbered headings, which would help the user easily understand the hierarchy of the different concepts and themes.